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Today's guest built and sold a 28 million dollar digital marketing agency and has been using Generative AI for business, marketing, and creativity since 2019. He's currently exploring how AI can enhance our creativity, marketing, and writing. Join us for a mind bending conversation about everything from marketing to the nature of reality. Some of what we cover: Building a business without building an audience Doing excellent work Building a referral system Artificial intelligence (past, future, present) Discomfort & skill growth Copywriting How to think about AI Powerful ChatGPT Prompts Prompt mistakes most people make A spiritual / trippy perspective on AI Beauty & The nature of reality -- Connect with Sam: For everything Sam does: samueljwoods.com For AI and creativity, with philosophy involved: bionicwriter.com For AI and all things online marketing: bionicmarketing.io -- Support the Podcast Leave us a review: ratethispodcast.com/artofnotyelling Sponsor the pod: subtleartofnotyelling.com/sponsor Join theboxworkshop.com -- Timestamps [1:01] Introduction and Background [3:30] Building Business Through Referrals [17:28] Premium Product Strategy [22:43] Copywriting and Conversion Rate Optimization [23:45] Creativity in Conversion Rate Optimization [25:41] Motivation for Writing and Copywriting [26:32] Creativity and Discomfort [28:10] Using AI for Copywriting [32:50] AI Tools for Creativity [33:43] The Value of Specific Use Cases [35:29] Prompt Engineering and Refining [43:49] Using Prompts as a Conversation Partner [45:06] Analyzing Text with Language Models [46:01] Text Analysis & AI language models [48:12] Machine Learning [52:47] Concerns with Machine Learning [53:02] The Ethics of AI [54:28] What is Human Sentience [55:45] The Nature of Reality, Beauty and sign off. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/artofnotyelling/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/artofnotyelling/support

Welcome to episode 2 of the Mind, Body, Spirit, FOOD podcast! Thank you so much to all the paid subscribers who make this work possible. Today I interview physical therapist, yoga instructor, breathwork facilitator and all around amazing being Samantha Fulton. I met Sam last year when I went to her for my own physical therapy needs (diastasis recti, which was causing other issues) and was blown away by her approach to her work. She approaches each body as a whole, unique organism, where everything is connected. This resonated deeply with my philosophies around food, and we've since developed a deep connection (and, thanks to Sam, I now have a fixed diastasis!). A few weeks ago Sam and I taught a class together called Intuitive Eating & Yoga, where I shared my practices around gaining presence and freedom around food, and Sam shared yogic principles around the body as well as how the nervous system influences digestion. Today we're diving deeper into the nervous system - what it is, how it impacts our food choices, and how it affects the ways we process food. Sam also shares simple techniques to bring ourselves back to center when we're off balance. Be sure to stay tuned until the end as she offers a beautiful practice that you can implement anytime, anywhere. You'll walk away from this episode with a deeper compassion for yourself and your own natural workings. What a gift. You can listen to the podcast right here, or, better yet, subscribe to the podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. I've also included an edited transcript of the conversation below. Please pipe in with any questions or comments, and enjoy the show! Find Sam on social media @fulbeing_collective. Nicki: Welcome to Mind Body Spirit Food. I'm your host, Nicki Sizemore, and in this podcast we'll explore the rituals, traditions, and cultural influences around food and how they connect us to our minds, our bodies, our spirits, the earth and our communities. This is a space that's dedicated to bringing more presence, ease, and joy into the process of feeding ourselves. Let's dive in.Hello and welcome. I am so happy to have you here and I'm so excited about today's episode. I interview Samantha Fulton, who's a physical therapist yoga teacher, but you guys, she's way more than that. She approaches the body in such a beautiful way. In fact, I met her last year when I went to see her for my own physical therapy needs.But today we're talking about the nervous system and how the nervous system affects our relationship to food as well as our digestion. There are so many juicy nuggets in this episode, and I think you're going to get a lot out of it. Be sure to stay tuned until the end because Sam offers a beautiful practice for bringing our nervous systems back into calibration when we're off. And this has implications that go far wider than just bringing ourselves back to a state of homeostasis. This influences how we digest, but it also influences how we think about our own bodies. And I think throughout this episode, perhaps my hope is that you'll learn to have a little bit more compassion for yourself.All right, let's get to it.Nicki: Sam, welcome. I'm so thrilled that you are here, and that you're actually my first guest on my podcast.Sam: Ooh, I am.Nicki: Yes.Sam: I'm so happy to be here. I'm even more honored to be here now than I know I'm your first guest. I think you can only go up from here because I am not used to being interviewed. So here we go.Nicki: Not even possible. We're going to start with a question that I ask all my guests. What is your cultural upbringing and how has that influenced your relationship to food?Sam: I'm laughing and breathing. I grew up with my mom. My parents were split since I was very young. And so I lived with my mom and my younger brother, and my grandparents lived upstairs from us. So we were very extended family oriented. And my father actually lived with his parents as well, so I had it on both sides.Nicki: Wow, that's great. Or maybe not, I'm not sure!Sam: It was great. And other things. We were very Italian, and very food oriented. My grandparents were very focused on food as sort of the indicator on how everyone was doing. Food was comfort. Food meant social engagement. It meant family gatherings and family meals. But it was also, “how good you're doing.” You know, like, what's wrong? You're not hungry? Why didn't you finish your dinner? You look sad, you look tired, you look sick. Here, have something to eat.Nicki: So food was the remedy for all emotional distress.Sam: It was the remedy. Yeah. We joke that the Italian psychotherapy is, “here, just have a slice of mozzarella.” Some people say garlic is the Italian penicillin. We kind of used it to treat mental illness as well. I say that with a warm and open heart. I don't say that to mock mental illness at all. It's very present in my family. A lot of us needed other medicines too. But that's our running family joke.My mother was definitely more progressive though. I watched her try to figure it out. She worked full-time, so my grandparents were caring for us a lot, but my mom did cook very whole foods. Our meals were always very complete, so there was always a protein and a starch, and a veggie and a dessert, and we had to eat it all.Nicki: And did you eat at home most nights or was your mom cooking most nights?Sam: Yes, yes. We hardly ever went out to eat that. I remember we maybe had pizza nights on Fridays. But we definitely had a lot of family meals at home that were cooked by her or my grandparents.Nicki: So as you got older—and you can totally correct me if I'm wrong—food was medicine in a very emotional way. Food was an indicator of how good you were doing. How did that impact you as you got older and perhaps cooking for yourself?Sam: Oh, that's a good question. I think I had that food-oriented nature from my grandparents and extended family, but I also watched my mom work with her own body image issues. That probably stemmed from when she was a child—sort of unresolved issues. And it was the eighties and nineties, so it was very “low fat.” Diet culture was starting to emerge. I also got influenced by that, just watching her go through her journey. I think I did have an innate message to myself that food was a reward and I could use it as reward or punishment, which I think is a really unhealthy relationship. It's an unhealthy association.Nicki: I think that a lot of people listening can relate to that.Sam: Yeah. I mean, it's food and exercise. I'm a movement professional, so I see that happening with movement and exercise all the time. I guess I was conscious of the food aspect of it, but I didn't realize how present it was in my body, in my psyche. I try not to live that way, and I think I'm gradually becoming more conscious, but it's certainly there. Nicki: I know, It's interesting because you had an Instagram post before the holidays and it sparked an Instagram post for me talking about food—this kind of capitalistic view that we have of food, especially I think for those of us who did grow up in the eighties and nineties. It's an input versus output equation. With food and exercise that's absolutely what I was taught—you eat this much, you better work it off this much—instead of a nurturing, soft, gentle relationship. Both of us realize now that it's not input versus output. It's not how the way our bodies work. There are times in my life where I have a lot of energy and movement feels really good, and there are times in my life when I need a lot of rest.  I'm getting better at honoring those cycles, but it wasn't what I was taught.Sam: Right, right. That makes all the sense when you say it. It made me exhale. That's what I attempt to bring to my clientele about movement and exercise, and I think what you're trying to do with food, which is why we connected so much and we wanted to merge our worlds. Nicki: Well that gets me to my next question because last week we taught a class together called Intuitive Eating and Yoga and it was a really powerful class. I approached the class from the food perspective and you dove into yoga and the body, but also the nervous system. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about this topic. Before we kind of get into it, I'll ask you how you became interested in the nervous system and then we can kind of start to unravel what the nervous system even is.Sam: We can't really talk about almost anything else without holding holding and knowing [the nervous] system and our inner workings. When I work with people with pain, people with chronic illness, people with a static injury, an injury that just happened when they were doing X activity, or something more chronic—and when I listen to my own body, when I have pains myself or when I'm experiencing anxiety, whatever it might be—is that even when that symptom resolves, even when I don't have that pain anymore or it changes, or it shifts, it's not really done. The work can always continue. It's not ever the exercises or the yoga poses that create the lasting change. Actually, the lasting change comes when we learn to listen. When we learn to commit to a deeper relationship with ourselves on all levels.Nicki: I just got chills all up and down my body. Yep.Sam: Thank you. Me too. I know this, but then I forget it. So it's important to keep learning. Nicki: So, learning to listen, does that mean starting with the nervous system? Do you start there before you go deeper?Sam: Yes. And you know, the first thing we did together was breath work. Breathing is one of my favorite tools and one of the first tools that I use with myself and with others to access the nervous system. The breath is always right here. We always have the breath. We don't need anything else. If we're practiced in that, we set ourselves up to regulate our nervous system. I work with myself because I'm on my own wild and crazy journey with anxiety and ADHD.  I was diagnosed as an adult with ADHD, and when I started to learn about my brain and how I'm wired, it was so liberating. To learn that there's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with anyone. And the responses that I was experiencing in my body were an attempt at my system trying to regulate, trying to keep me safe. It's a very smart thing that my body's trying to do. To learn how I'm wired, it was like, oh my gosh. It was very liberating, and it also put a lot of tools at my fingertips.Nicki: So what is the nervous system for those of us who aren't versed in this language? I think all of us have a sense of the “fight or flight,” but can you explain what it is?Sam: Yes. Simply put, we're referring to the autonomic nervous system, which is conducted or regulated by what's called the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is one of our cranial nerves, so it comes from our brain—our brainstem. When I learned about the vagus nerve, it really shifted a lot of things for me. I talk a lot about the polyvagal theory. The old model of the autonomic nervous system is what we know to be our fight or flight response—that's called our sympathetic nervous system. That's our accelerator. It's what causes the response to fight or flight. In our modern world, it doesn't always look like fight with our fists or flight with our feet. It can look like a lot of other things, which we may or may not get to in this conversation, but it's very complex as to how that can show up in our bodies in our modern world where we're not fighting a bear or running away from a bear. But we are having other responses and other bodily experiences that feel quite like that. And then we have the parasympathetic nervous system (this is still the old model), which is our break. It's “rest and digest.” And the old model says one response is good, and the other is bad. One is up, the other is down. It was very polarized. The polyvagal theory was developed by a doctor by the name of Porges. If anybody's interested, you can look up Stephen Porges. He has a lot of resources on online. Be careful about other resources of the polyvagal theory. There are other good ones certainly, but there's also a lot of misinformation on the internet.Nicki: I can commisserate. In the food world there's a lot of misinformation.Sam: The polyvagal theory is a little bit nuanced; it's that the vagus nerve has two branches. We still have our sympathetic nervous system, which again, is that fight or flight response. But then our vagus nerve has two branches. One is the dorsal vagal branch, which is considered numbing, shutting down, freezing. This is that down energy.And then there's the ventral vagal branch, which is more balanced. When we're in this state and we're in this response, we are secure. We can socially engage, we can digest our food, we can sleep well. We can have healthy relationships, healthy exchanges. I'm not even going into our organ function, but all of these nervous system responses greatly influence our organs, our heart, our lungs, our digestive organs, our metabolic system. The theory teaches that there's a spectrum that we're on. It's not like I'm here, here, or here, but there's a spectrum or like a ladder on which we climb up or down. And we all have a different capacity to feel balanced. We all have what's called the “window of tolerance.” So my window of tolerance might be different from your window of tolerance. My window of tolerance today might be different than what my window of tolerance was when I was 18.It definitely changes as we change. And different stressors in our lives may shift where we are on the spectrum. And the goal is not to stay balanced all the time. A healthy nervous system is not always relaxed, is not always balanced. Nicki: I love to hear this. Sam: Isn't that good news? A healthy nervous system needs to be challenged. We need stressors and then we need the ability to recover. We need tools to recover.Nicki: And that recovery is probably the thing that's important. How do we learn how to recover whenwe do get stressed?Sam: Totally. There are also times in our lives that we need stress. This is an example, I need a little bit of that sympathetic activity, that fight or flight activity, if I am going to drive on the Taconic at night. I need a little bit of increased attention, a little vigilance. I need a little bit of that spark if I want to stay attentive. Or if I'm playing a competitive game or something along those lines, you want a little bit of oomph, you want a little bit of spice.Nicki: You know, it reminds me of cooking. Cooking for me is at one time very relaxing, and just kind of slow. But there are times when I love the energy—when seven things are cooking at once, and I get in this dance state and it's definitely elevated. I'm present and tuned in, but whew, I've got to be in that upper [state], keeping my eye on everything. But there's something exciting about that. There's something fun about that. I don't want to cook like that all the time though. I also want thosetimes where it's—Sam: And you don't want to stay there!Nicki: No, I don't want to stay there (laughing). This is why I don't work in restaurant kitchens, which I have done and which I do not enjoy because you're very much in that hyper state. But that's interesting to hear that we go back and forth and that it's not necessarily good or bad all the time. Right?Sam: Absolutely. And to give you an example on the flip side is that if I want to enjoy a quiet meal with my loved one and I really want to digest my food well, I want to be balanced, of course, but I also need a little bit of that dorsal vagal state. I need a little bit of that downward tone to my energy. That's what really gets my digestive juices flowing, and it gets me very present and relaxed in my body.Nicki: I love learning about this because our nervous system directly influences our digestion. I see digestion from a very energetic place. I literally had indigestion for five years after my youngest daughter was born because she was—I love you Juni—but she was a hard little baby and a hard toddler. I would go from rushing from work, to cooking, to eating, and I would never pause. I would never take a breath. She was a fussy baby at the dinner table and all of that built up. My digestion was so poor. It wasn't until I hit a wall with it and realized, wait a minute, I can see this pattern. I can see what's going on, and I can see how fast I'm moving, and I'm not even breathing through any of this. But while I was in it, I couldn't see it.Now, looking back, I can see that my nervous system was like, whoa come dinnertime. I mean, I've had a meditation practice for a very long time in the morning, but then I'd get into the kitchen and everything would be thrown out the window! I've been bringing these practices into the kitchen, and now I can see that these are nervous system practices in some way. I always take two deep breaths before I start cooking and before I start eating. And I engage my senses. While for me this was a way to bring more ease and joy into the process of cooking, this was also calming my nervous system. So what is that connection between food and the nervous system?Sam: The vagus nerve is actually also called the gut brain. And the heart brain. Isn't that beautiful?Nicki: Yes.Sam: Our body is always giving cues, always firing, always giving us subtle cues unless they need to be louder, right? They start subtle and when we don't listen, they get louder, but it's always giving subtle cues asking for attention here or there, asking for balance where it's needed. This internal messaging system is called interoception. We think of our senses as being sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch. But we actually have a sixth sense and it's called interoception. And it's more complex than I'm saying now, but it's basically our capacity to decipher these internal cues and sensations that we're feeling in our bodies, and then decide what we need based on those sensations. If we're constantly dysregulated or if we get stuck in that high energy state, if we get stuck in that sympathetic response, or if we're getting pulled down into that dorsal vagel state and we can't rebalance—we don't have tools to rebalance or we don't even know that we're not balanced—we get mixed up with the cues. We can't accurately decipher what the cues are telling us to do. It's easy to get the wires crossed. So for example do you ever eat when you're bored?Nicki: Yeah.Sam: Right? It's not hunger. We eat when we're bored or we don't eat when we're stressed, when we're anxious, or vice versa. These can go both ways because people manifest these things in all different ways. We scroll on our phones when we're feeling sad or when we're lonely. We just want go to sleep when we're in pain, or we can't sleep when we're overly tired. These things get really mixed up.Nicki: And so we're seeking something to fix the problem, but the thing we're seeking is not the cause of the problem. Is that right? Like we're seeking almost these numbing behaviors. Like, “oh, I'm so bored, I'm just going to eat something,” but actually the boredom is coming from somewhere else.Sam: For sure. These are all ways of scratching an itch. We're scratching a deep itch and we're not quite dropped in enough to our own systems and quite practiced in having a relationship with ourselves, so it manifests in all kinds of ways. We're all addicted to something—these little glass rectangles that we carry around in our hands all the time, they are big back scratchers for people. And food can also be, among many other things. But then a little more complexly, down to the cellular level, we can't digest food properly when we're dysregulated. Nicki: I can feel that in my body, but it's taken me years to understand that connection, and I didn't have a language for it until you and I started talking. So how do we know when we're dysregulated and how do we get back?Sam: Such a good question. There are so many symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system that will oftentimes look like other things and that oftentimes come as the result of other things as well. It helps to know if I tend to lean towards the fight or flight response. If that's my go-to, if I'm a high tension kind of person and I'm in fast forward mode all the time, it helps to know that our digestive system functions are actually very slowed down when we're in that state. You would think it's the opposite, but evolutionarily speaking, if we're running from a bear or if we're fighting the bear, we can't use energy to digest food. We need to conserve our energy—we're not going to have the right hormones released in our system, and our motility, the muscle contractions that move food through our system, that's not where we're going to use our energy.  We're using our energy in our large limb muscles. And vice versa, if we're stuck in that freeze or numb, low energy mode, our digestive system works overtime. It senses, “I don't have enough energy. Maybe I need to break down some food.” Nicki: So it tries to make up for the fact that you are feeling so low.Sam: Exactly. It tries to overcompensate. Our bodies are always doing that. They're trying to help; these responses are very smart. We have to thank our bodies for trying to keep us safe. These systems evolved over time, evolutionarily, out of necessity so that we would stay alive. It's our survival brain. And we evolved into higher thinking beings, and we do have the ability to decipher the threats, but our bodies don't know the difference. It's not conscious. A threat is a threat, and our higher thinking minds can say, “wait, is the fact that I'm stuck in traffic and I'm late for a meeting going to kill me?” But first we have to be in touch with what that response feels like in our bodies or else we can't connect to that.I mean, there are countless signs and symptoms. Chronic pain, which can either be the stressor or the stress response, a lot of the times it's both. Digestive disturbances [are another]. We always want to determine with the help of medical professionals if digestive issues are structural or physical, diet related or nervous system related. And most often it's a combo. You don't want to assume that just because I'm having stomach pain, I must be stressed. It's very important to rule out anything that's going to threaten your health. But yeah, sleep disturbances, irritability, emotional swings, brain fog, memory stuff, attention span issues, you know, the list goes on. Nicki: It's so interesting. My podcast launched last week, and I was having a somatic—a bodily—fear, and it would come and go. It was like a tightening. All of a sudden I'd be sitting there doing nothing and all of a sudden I'd have this fear response. First I felt like, okay, I need to acknowledge that I'm having this fear response. I feel like just acknowledging it is a major step in easing it. Even though the fear response persisted, I could see it, and I could say to myself, “oh, that's just fear. I can sit in the fear. My life is not threatened right now. The fear is coming from a deep, subconscious place. I will sit with you, but I don't need to change you.”What I think I would've done in the past when I was a younger person—that fear would've caused me to go do something to numb it. I don't know what that thing would've been, maybe exercise over-exercise or something to have given me a sense of control. But I think what I'm trying to say is that if we can feel these things that come in through our body and if we can name them, then it gives us that little bit of space. It feels like you have a little bit of space so you can be like, wait, “how do I want to react to this? What's the action going to be?” Or maybe there's absolutely no need for action. Maybe I just need to sit here with it.Sam: That is perfection what you just said. That's exactly it. And that comes from a deep place of self-compassion.Nicki: Hmm. Yes.Sam: And that is yoga. It's, “how do I show up for what's present, right here and now, without wanting to change it, without going on with a story about it. Just, this is what's here.”Nicki: This is what's here. So when those things show up and we're feeling stressed, we're feeling anxiety—or maybe we're feeling so low and so sluggish—and we can name it, we can have compassion for it and not judge ourselves for it, what are a few easy tools that you can give us to come back into our body? To connect, to calm, or to bring up?I know in working with you that breathwork has been really powerful for me in either calming the the nervous system and in invigorating myself to get moving when I am in that stuck overwhelmed state.Do you have any tips?Sam: Ah, I do. And you already introduced one, when you were saying, “when I can name it, it's very liberating.” To say something, to call it what it is, to say it out loud or in your mind, it's very, very powerful. One of my favorite go-to's is a body scan and name the sensations. We can do this with physical sensations, we can do it with pain, we can do it with hunger (or something that we are interpreting as hunger and we're not quite sure). We can do it with thirst, we can do it with emotional feelings. Whatever arises, we can do this. And even if it's emotional in nature, even if you're feeling sad or fearful, our emotions live in our bodies. Whatever is in our head is in our body.Nicki: Ah, right.Sam: So I like to either sit or lay down. And start at the very top of my head and bring my awareness there. If people are trying this at home, bring the awareness through the body, from the head, into the face, into the neck and shoulders, down the arms, into the hands, down the front of the body, the chest, the ribs, the belly, the spine from the neck down to the lower back, the pelvis and the hips, the thighs, the knees, the lower legs, the ankles, the feet, and out through the toes.See what's talking, if there's a sensation anywhere. Stay with it for a few breaths. And I love to use the phrase, “here and now I feel.” We might have a tendency to go on in our minds like, oh, you know, “here in my shoulder now I feel a tightness. Oh, well that's because I have bad posture.” We might have a tendency to attach reasoning or story or dialogue about it. And the practice is really just to describe the sensation. Here and now I feel a tightness. Here and now I feel a burn. Here and now I feel a poke. Right? Whatever it might be. Or here and now I feel joy. Here and now I feel fullness. Here and now I feel space. It can be anything. Taking a few breaths with just those describing words, with the intention of allowing it to be exactly as it is without changing it, is very powerful.Nicki: it's full acceptance, isn't it. In my body the way I feel that is, when I fully accept something, I stop resisting it. And when I stop resisting it, guess what? It can move through me. When I try to battle something within my body, it gets even more deeply lodged.Sam: Mm-hmm. Again, it comes from a place of self-compassion. We don't need any extra blame or shame or judgment about what we're feeling. Especially if what we're already feeling is hard.Nicki: Yes. Thank you. Amen.Sam: I'll also just say that there are different approaches. This technique, if it's not resonating, that's okay. There are a vast variety of approaches for folks if if they really want to get in touch with their nervous system. There are what's called top-down tools, which work with how our thoughts and beliefs affect our system and affect our bodies, which can be very powerful. This is like psychotherapy, group therapy, awareness practices like meditation, affirmations and intention settings. These can be really great tools for people who that resonates with. That top down approach from my brain to my body. And if that tends to not work for you, the bottom up approach is using our body and our breath to connect to our brain, to affect our brain. This is like breathing exercises, movement, postural positioning, body work, play, and even certain foods and drink. How does a mug of hot tea make you feel if your energy is up high? Or if your energy is down low, how does a citrusy sip of water feel? Again, it's understanding interoception sense, which practices like the body scan can really help hone. Then we start to know what tools will work for us.Nicki: Yeah, because the vagus nerve is a two-way street, right? So information goes from our brain to down into our body, but also from our body up into our brain. So if we can see that and manipulate—not manipulate that, that's the wrong word—but we can come at it from both ways. For me, that just gives me an extra little superpower where if my body is feeling this way, let's bring it up to my brain, or vice versa. There's knowledge both places. Sam: Oh you are so saying it. And you're also holding two truths. It's not the brain that directs the body, and it's not the body that directs the brain. They have a symbiotic relationship. Part of the reason why I love breath so much—part of the reason why that's one of my favorite things in the world—is because our respiratory system is the only—it's one of our autonomic nervous system functions, right? The others are our cardiovascular system, our digestive system, our metabolic system. Those things are always happening all the time. They happen automatically in our sleep. We're not thinking about it. We're digesting food. Our hearts are beating. There's a lot going on without our decision making to make it happen. But our respiratory system is the only autonomic function that is both. It's going all the time—we're breathing even when we're not thinking about it. And then we can also consciously change the breath at any moment in time.It's both voluntary and involuntary. So that's my next go-to tool. The first was the body scan with naming the sensations, and the second tool is breath. The most basic breathing pattern, if you've never worked with your breath before, there's something in the yoga practice called equal breath. It's a one-to-one ratio. I like it because it's very accessible. You can do it anywhere, and you can also pace yourself quite easily. You don't have to match anybody else's breath.You would start by just first paying attention to how your breath feels naturally and not try to change it.And you can bring a count to your in-breath, and whatever that count was—maybe you only breathe in for two—you try to breathe out for two. You match the exhale to the inhale. Then over time it might feel accessible to increase by one beat, the in-breath and the out-breath.This rhythm starts to naturally soothe the nervous system. There's a pulsating thing that our internal workings are just vibing with. It's very similar to rocking a baby. It occupies something in our brains—we don't want to be so busy, we don't want to be so scattered. It hones our attention. It's extremely powerful.Nicki: Sam, thank you so much. I feel so calm and content just from hearing you, just from witnessing and practicing these practices with you. And I hope that those of you listening out there, I hope you give these a try. Let us know where we can find you in the world?Sam: I'm a little hidden. I need help getting more present on social media and on the internet. I'm much better in person one-on-one, so, oh my gosh, I would love to meet you all in person. But my website is fulbeingphysicaltherapy.com. My Instagram page is @fulbeing_collective. And I hope to do another Intuitive Eating and Yoga workshop with you, Nicki. So your folks will definitely hear about that.Nicki: I want to thank you for these amazing teach teachings, for introducing us to the nervous system and for giving us all some—oh gosh, I'm going to say this—food for thought. Sorry, that was bad. But the nervous system, how it influences how we're eating and how we're feeling, I just feel like being granted this knowledge—just like you said—makes me feel more compassionate for myself. If there's a better gift out there, I don't know what it is. So thank you for that. And thank you for sharing your beautiful breathwork practices with us.Sam: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so grateful to be connected to you in this way and to connect with your communityNicki: All right. Until next time. Thank you so much for listening. If this work resonates with you in any way, you can support it by leaving a review or comment or sharing it with friends. Also, you can sign up for the newsletter, Mind, Body, Spirit, FOOD, and by becoming a paid member for just $5 a month you help fund this entire project. Thank you so much to all of you who are already subscribed, especially to those paid subscribers. This work could not happen without you. I'm Nicki Sizemore, and as always, remember to nourish yourself with intention and love. Get full access to Mind, Body, Spirit, FOOD at mindbodyspiritfood.substack.com/subscribe

Sam Feeney is an author, strategist, coach, husband, and father of five. Today, Sam shares with us the paths he meandered as a young man, how everything changed when he met his wife, and what it meant to learn about God as Father. Also, he tells us why his family took a huge leap of faith and moved from Pennsylvania to Colorado. Sam is passionate about helping men grow in their faith and interactions with their families. Sam's story reminds us that God is one but also three persons and keeping that perspective changes everything. Listen to Sam's story on your favorite podcast app now! Stories Sam shared: Growing up in Pennsylvania in a Christian family Resisting faith because it might mean his dad was right Deciding that he would become a Christian despite of his relationship with his father Reconnecting with God on summers off during college How meeting his wife changed him How learning to be married challenged them Learning about the Holy Spirit and navigating the ditches Finding a church that had a good balance of faith in the Trinity Holding his son helped bring healing Why the idea of fatherhood is so valuable Moving to Colorado with his family and the faith it took Starting a business and his podcast, Made to Thrive How career affects men and their interactions with their family Great quotes from Sam: For a long time I resisted faith because it might mean my dad was right. If my dad loves me half as much as I love this kid, I've undersold him. If you put eternity in our hearts, we're looking for where he shows up as soon as possible. My biggest challenge as a dad is trying to prolong credibility with my kids as long as I can. Resources we mentioned: Sam's website Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing by Bronnie Ware Forgotten God – Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit by Francis Chan Extraordinary: The Life You're Meant to Live by John Bevere How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil by D.A. Carson The Life of Trust: The Autobiography of George Müller: With An Introduction by George Müller Related episodes: Tim Winders and Redefining Success Les Hughes and Jon Sanders and the Rise of EntrePastors Kari Bartkus and the Friendship of Jesus The post Sam Feeney and Experiencing God as Father appeared first on Eric Nevins.

Sam Heath and I worked together at McKinsey many many years ago. He is now responsible for marketing Tim Horton's in Canada (where it is by far the largest quick service restaurant chain), and Timmie's fledging business of selling its product in grocery stores. Last year, out of nowhere, Sam's heart stopped and he “died”. We explore how that event affected him and his overall career in this episode. Next week we dive into Tim Horton's - both the stores and the CPG products - and how he is growing the two inter-related businesses. You can also listen to these interviews in your podcast player of choice: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed (for premium episodes).Sponsor MessageGet paid for your feedback, join Wynter's research panelWant to give back to the community while having a low-key side hustle to fund your habit? Provide feedback on product messaging for industry-leading B2B companies, be compensated every time you do it ($15-$50 per survey). Takes ~10-15 min to take one survey, low-key time commitment.Transcript:Edward: My guest today is Sam Heath, head of retail for Restaurant Brands International. That's the CPG group for Tim Hortons. Today, we cover Sam's path to overseeing the restaurant chains, the entire CPG business—Brown, McKinsey, OLG, Burger King, and Tim Hortons. I worked with Sam when we were both at McKinsey Canada. I'm excited to chat with him today. Sam, in 2015, you were the Senior Director of Innovation for Burger King, but then you left that to run all of marketing for Tim Hortons Canada. You've never had a marketing title before. How exactly did you get that role? How did you jump from running innovation to running marketing? Sam: At the time, Burger King was a little bit crazy in a way that I describe match my type of crazy. They took people that had done well in whatever roles that they'd had and gave them more stuff to go do. I'd look at marketing. I've done analytics. I've done other things like that, but I'd never done the actual direct-to-consumer go get impressions, sell the product, sell the brand marketing. It was a really pretty big jump. It was taken by the people I work for on faith that I could do a good job at it. Edward:At that time, Burger King owned Tim Hortons. It was one organization.Sam: When I joined, it was just Burger King, but when they moved me up, it was about a year after the merger had happened. Edward: You had delivered for them around innovation. They said, hey, we trust you to run innovations. Now, we're going to trust you to run marketing. Sam: For the most iconic brand in all of Canada, yes. Go from this team of six people that are sampling hamburgers in the test kitchen. Why don't you take over this team of 70 with a $300 million marketing budget up in Canada?Edward: Why did they think you were capable of doing that? I know you're capable of doing that, but why did they think you were capable of pulling that off? That seems like a big risk. Sam: It is a big risk, but it was taken by people who had taken risks like that at Burger King and seen them paid off. They also were willing to replace me if it didn't look like it was working.Edward: You said they took risks like that before with you, or are they just risk-takers in general?Sam: Just risk-taking in general. It was very much the culture of the organization. This was a bunch of people who looked at Burger King and said, this is a good brand—it's just clearly not doing well back in 2011—bought it and said, we need to change everything to turn this around. They went from a 300-person organization in 2011 when they acquired Burger King, I think about 20 of those people were left when I had joined 2½ years later.Edward: When that opportunity came up, did you put yourself forward for it, or did they come to you and say, hey, we have these gaps. Sam, can you step into it?Sam: It was very much the second. They said, we have this gap. The semi-annual upside is what's happening. I got invited there under the pretense of making a presentation on something else. When I met with the President, Tim Horton, he said, congratulations, we've got a new role for you. It was a jump of a couple of levels, at least, and an order of magnitude more responsibility.Edward: What do you think when you do that? Did you think you had the marketing skills to do this? Did you think you're going to figure it out as you go along? What was going through your mind?Sam: I've always been interested with everything that's going on around me. It's not like I was ignoring the media advice and the creative that was happening while I was designing hamburgers or working on pricing. I just liked to see how things plug together and organize, and I trusted myself to learn the pieces that I didn't know. Also, as you get more senior, you trust yourself not to need all the details and build a team that's capable of filling in for your own gaps. Edward: What skills did you think you were missing going in? What did you think that, hey, these are the things I need to figure out fast if I'm going to be successful on this job?Sam: Honestly, all the pieces that people traditionally think about as marketing—creative review, creative design, how do you translate what the brand stands for into what you're actually saying in the advertising, going from overall marketing strategy down to campaign, sliding down to briefs, down to approvals of the creative that's going out on television, digital, and other places.Edward: Now you think you know what you don't know. How do you go about getting those skills? What did you actually do to be ready?Sam: The previous CMO did a great job of setting me up for that. I had his team to rely on. Clearly, Tim Hortons was a brand that had had a positive store sale count for over 20 years. They had a team that knew how to do this. Just being gentle and being careful. Just being given a job doesn't mean you need to change anything. Often, you're a caretaker for what came before. It's a mistake marketers make to say that, well, I'm here now. I need to change everything. Rule number one should be first, do no harm.Edward: It's interesting. Oftentimes, when things are going well, that's not when they replace the head of marketing. Here's a place where they replaced the head of marketing. They brought you in but things were already going really well. It feels like that's a time when you hire someone who is a caretaker marketer, but you're in a place where they brought in somebody who wasn't even a marketer at all. That almost feels like they want to shake things up, but in this case, they didn't want that. Sam: There was, again, that culture piece from Burger King of risk-takers, people who want to be bold and change things up. They wanted to put that culture in place at Tim Hortons. They wanted to maintain the results but still move over to what is now the RBI culture of being a bit more bold and taking a few more risks. Ultimately, if you look at the performance of Tim Hortons in the few years after that happened, there was a bit of a stumble. It was a bit of a mismatch for the brand. We can talk about strategically, whether that was the right choice, but that's the position that I was placed in.Edward: That's interesting. I'm thinking about you, particularly, rather than the company. How do you think about changing things up and making things better when you don't have a lot of expertise? You're reliant on the team because they're the experts on this, but at the same time, they hired you on to change things. How do you make those changes without messing things up?Sam: If you have learned how to do a new job enough times, you start to get an idea of what it feels like to learn a new job. You know that there is a structure that you're trying to understand, a set of processes, a set of routines, and things that are done for particular reasons. You have an idea of what that wheel looks like once you do understand it as you're trying to figure out. Taking that meta approach to learning a new job while trying not to disturb things, what I try to bring to that was I like to measure everything. I like to have a bottom-up roadmap or scorecard of how things fit together so that we can see whether things are going well or not. Often, that type of high-level organization, that connective tissue that plugs together all the little bits and pieces that marketers are doing every day, every week, every month, that I found is where I can usually add value and help people see what they're doing better.Edward: I want to go back and talk a little bit about the path that got you there. What were you passionate about when you were 12–14 years old?Sam: I was passionate about Space Lego and role-playing games, whether computer games or specifically, Dungeons & Dragons. Edward: Do you think diving into Lego, diving into D&D affect your later life at all? Did you develop skills there that play out today or was it a one-off and it didn't really matter? Sam: I'm not sure that I developed skills during Lego and D&D that changed me. I think it's more that I chose the things then that I liked doing and I honed skills that I may have already had. Lego is a lot of organization, seeing how things get put together, and being patient as you meticulously follow these rules to achieve a great product. D&D is just a really interesting game. It lets you explore everything from how rules create conduct in the world to all sorts of other things that are useful for managing around the management table. Edward: Let's go forward a little bit and talk about your first job. In your first job, you were a bike courier? Sam: Pretty much, yes.Edward: Talk to me a little bit of what you learned as a bike courier and how that affected things later. Sam: First, just to set the stage, in the 90s, there were a lot more bike couriers hopping around than there are now. You've probably seen a few in cities but they have largely been replaced by Adobe Acrobat, esigning, and things. There were hundreds in Vancouver. Edward: This was not a food delivery. You aren't Postmates of the 1990s?Sam: No. I was doing bank deposits, getting documents signed, dropping off documents to be signed, everything else. At one point, I showed up at the bank and realized I've been riding around with $40,000 cash in my backpack for the previous 1½ hours. People would hand you deposits. It was interesting, which was for some reason really motivating and inspiring for me. It felt like I was the grease that was helping the wheels of commerce keep turning. I was helping real estate deals get signed, seeing big contracts get closed, seeing how and why people were soothing each other for different things because these were the documents I was carrying around. Edward: You became aware of that stuff or was it a matter of, hey, Sam, take this piece of paper and get it across the street? It was like you've learned what the pieces of paper were for and the impact of your decisions were.Sam: You do because people don't call a bike courier when a document needs to get there eventually. I would show up at offices seven minutes before a bank six blocks away was going to close and something you needed to get to the back before close. They wanted me to know how important it was. There were times I was delivering legal depositions or summons and I couldn't deliver it. I would go back and give a statement that would get taken down and taken to court.People would talk to me. People like talking to people. I was friendly and personable. I learned a lot more of how these businesses were running and people would think I would. Edward: It's almost like those stories of the guy working in the mailroom who learns how the CEO operates and then moves up to the ranks. Sam: The secret of my success. Edward: You got your PhD in Computer Science. What were you planning to do with that before you actually left the world of academia?Sam: I planned to leave the world of academia since I realized that I was in the world of academia pretty much. I thought that getting a PhD in Computer Science would be a good way of getting a good-paying job as a teacher. I like teaching people. I like helping other people understand problems and dive their way through things. Once I realized that all I had to do was research and that was what I've built myself a path to, I got out as fast as I could. Edward: You went to McKinsey. Why did you end up in McKinsey?Sam: I ended up at McKinsey because they dropped off a stack of brochures in the mailroom of the computer science department where I was at. A friend of mine said that one of his high school friends went there. They were smart, liked it, and so would I. It was no more strategic than that. Edward: On that note, I want to jump ahead a little bit. In 2013, you joined Burger King to develop their pricing strategy. After spending a bunch of time doing strategy at McKinsey's, strategy at OLG, you're doing more strategy at Burger King, but then you left a year later to run product innovation. That seems a pretty big switch for someone who had been spending their career doing strategy. How did that happen?Sam: One thing, you may have guessed from why I decided to leave academia, every time I've tried to make a strategic choice or plan out who I want to be in five years, I've been spectacularly wrong in my career. A decent explanation of what strategy works is the questions that clients don't know even where the question fits. It's not even that they have a question they don't know how to solve. They don't even know where it fits. They go, oh, it's not operations or it's not marketing. It's a strategy. Let's call in somebody.Edward: It's the other.Sam: It is really the other bucket. After a career literally of answering the random questions that nobody could figure out how to answer, I got pretty comfortable with just jumping into, this topic looks interesting. I'll go do that now.The opportunity came up in Miami to go do pricing for a year. I did that. Because I correctly guessed that Burger King was a company with a culture that was pretty well-attuned to how thought, after a year of doing pricing, they said, hey, why don't you move to the test kitchen and figure out what sauces we should put on our original chicken sandwich and extra-long cheeseburger? You seem like you might be good at that. I'm like, okay.Edward: It is interesting the way you describe it because it feels like coming from a career in strategy, people think of strategy as, hey, what's the five-year plan? What's the 10-year plan? But for your own career, you're saying that strategy is the last thing on your mind.Sam: It could sound like that, but in my experience, strategy isn't a bottom-up, let's think about what we should be doing in five years. It's more a matter of, we're doing a bunch of stuff and we don't know how it fits altogether or we don't know that it all makes sense. Can you come in and take a look at all the things we're doing and make sure that there is a connection to our underlying core of who we are as a company?I think of strategy not as a bottom-up, high-level thinking but more of an organization, seeing how things that a company is already doing fit together. I think that's similar to how I've thought about my own career. We can figure out how it fits together afterwards. It's more a matter of making sure that the individual ideas make sense at the time.Strategy is looking across things going on and plugging them together. Career decisions are doing things and figuring out how they fit together afterwards. You've probably got a pretty good intuitive idea of what you want to do next.Edward: It almost sounds like strategy is story-telling.Sam: I think that's very, very much the case. You need to help senior executives figure out how to tell the story of who they become as a company.Edward: Your career is almost the same idea. You do the things. You take opportunistic chances. Then, after the fact, you can go back and tell a story about how it all fits together.Sam: Which interestingly, if you go back to when I was 13 years old and running a Dungeons & Dragons game, sometimes, your players just do stuff. You go, yeah, that makes sense. I can fit that together into the story I'm telling. It's not that it was pre-planned. You're just working with what exists.Edward: Sam, what were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Sam: I think if you look at any of the times I've switched companies or switched careers, that's when I realized that the current plan that I was on wasn't working anymore. I [...] those things as failures. I spent five years getting a PhD that I realized four years in I did not want. At one point, I realized that I didn't want to be a consultant anymore.There haven't been any spectacular failures where people have come to me and said, you've really disappointed us and we're going to fire you now. Instead, I'm more a matter of the thing that I thought was interesting. It evolves or changes in a way that I no longer like or I evolve and change in a way that I'm no longer interested in. That happens every 3–5 years. We just change.Edward: Sam, you're now a head of the retail of Restaurant Brands International. I want to cover more of that in part two, but I want to touch on an experience you had last summer, if you're comfortable talking about it. Tell me, about 40 minutes last summer, you died and they managed to bring you back to life. In a movie, that would cause you to reevaluate everything in your life and change who you are and what you think about. Did it do anything like that for you? How did you change after that event if at all?Sam: That's a really good question. For anybody thinking about business was spectacular, it would be like a scene from the most over-the-top hospital drama you've seen. The first defibrillator did not work on me. They had to go find an antique one that happened to put out more power. That's what eventually restarted my heart back to life.I thought about this and I still think about whether I should be reevaluating my life, but my approach of, am I happy with what am I doing right now and if not, then I'll go find something else to do has served me pretty well. I haven't spent 10 years chasing a goal that's 10 years down the road in the hopes that once I achieve it, I'll be happy. I try to make sure that I've enjoyed what I'm doing along the way.I came out of that. Actually, the first thing I did was send a selfie while I was still intubated to my Microsoft Teams group at work saying, don't think I'll be in at work today. I was back on the job within 8 weeks of meeting 39 minutes of CPR with a very talented team at the Toronto General Hospital.My reevaluation of my life ended up not really being one. I'm still pretty comfortable with the choices I've been making.Edward: Sam, what are your productivity tricks? What do you do to be productive that most people don't do?Sam: You're either doing things or you're not doing things. If you're doing things, it's less of a worrying about focusing on staying on one task or focusing on the highest priority item, than continuing to work on it until you lose momentum, you lose steam.I would rather finish 60% of one task, get distracted, go to 50% of another task, go back to the first one, and then force myself to finish something after I lose interest. As long as I am being productive, I don't really worry necessarily whether it's my top priority item or third or fourth in my priority list. I just enjoy the fact that I'm getting things done.Edward: There's something about that. Like prioritization is overrated in that you're much better just be getting something done than spending a lot of time trying to optimize for the right thing to do.Sam: Things are either important or they're not. If they're not, they shouldn't be on your list. If they're important and they're on your list, as long as you're doing anything, you're doing well.Edward: I read somewhere—I can't even remember who it was—their model of as long as your distractions are also something you want to get done, then you're fine. If you stop doing what you want to do because you go and spend time on Facebook, that's not so good. But if you're stopping doing project A because you're distracted to do project B and then you get distracted and start working on project C, you're probably going to be in a good place by the end of the month.Sam: Yeah. That's exactly right.Edward: Sam, this has been fantastic. We're going to pick this up next week under my new publishing model. We'll pick up with part two. We're going to dive into Tim Hortons' business.Sam: Right. Thanks, Ed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

Sam talks about Batista and the nWo (with X Pac) entering the Hall of Fame, recaps NXT, talks about Seth Rollins' heel turn, Rusev's divorce, previews NWA In To The Fire and WWE TLC, plus your emails.   Try Blue Chew for free at BlueChew.com with promo code ROBERTS   Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM"   For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sam talks about Batista and the nWo (with X Pac) entering the Hall of Fame, recaps NXT, talks about Seth Rollins' heel turn, Rusev's divorce, previews NWA In To The Fire and WWE TLC, plus your emails.Try Blue Chew for free at BlueChew.com with promo code ROBERTSGet $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM"For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Sam Roberts gives an immediate review of Crown Jewel, Bray Wyatt becoming Universal Champion, and the first ever women's match in Saudi Arabia.  Sam talks about the upcoming NXT War Games, The Kabuki Warriors, and more. Subscribe to get a new Notsam Wrestling show EVERY Monday and Thursday! Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM"    For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sam Roberts gives an immediate review of Crown Jewel, Bray Wyatt becoming Universal Champion, and the first ever women's match in Saudi Arabia.  Sam talks about the upcoming NXT War Games, The Kabuki Warriors, and more. Subscribe to get a new Notsam Wrestling show EVERY Monday and Thursday! Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Sam Roberts talks about the finish to The Fiend vs Seth Rollins at Hell in a Cell, what went down on Raw, this week's round of the Wednesday Night War, and drafts Raw and Smackdown before the official draft begins. Subscribe to get a new Notsam Wrestling show EVERY Monday and Thursday! Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

This week on the Ain’t Easy Being Green podcast….We celebrate our one year anniversary episode in style!!!! NY JETS Camp update. Who’s stock is rising, whos stock is falling? Ryan Khalil addition. What does this meen for Sam? For the rest of the offense? We get into our 2019 Expectations for Sam, Leveon, Gase and the team as a whole. Plus we take some time to thank everyone that has helped make the past year a great one for the A.E.B.G. podcast!!!

Stokely Hathaway, as he was known previously, talks to Sam about his journey to WWE, deciding to become a wrestling manager, becoming a wrestler, breaking out in Evolve, studying acting, and more. Sam talks about Evolve, Fight for the Fallen, Extreme Rules, Bray Wyatt, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Stokely Hathaway, as he was known previously, talks to Sam about his journey to WWE, deciding to become a wrestling manager, becoming a wrestler, breaking out in Evolve, studying acting, and more. Sam talks about Evolve, Fight for the Fallen, Extreme Rules, Bray Wyatt, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All Ego Ethan Page talks to Sam Roberts about choosing to be in Impact Wrestling, locker room etiquette, having an ego too early, and more. Sam talks about Seth Rollins on twitter, Evolve's 10th Anniversary, Undertaker's return, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All Ego Ethan Page talks to Sam Roberts about choosing to be in Impact Wrestling, locker room etiquette, having an ego too early, and more. Sam talks about Seth Rollins on twitter, Evolve's 10th Anniversary, Undertaker's return, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Montez Ford from The Street Profits talks to Sam Roberts about winning the tag team championship at NXT Take Over, getting to NXT, what he learned in Evolve, creating the Street Profits, Sam's comments on Bianca Belair, and more. Sam talks about Jon Moxley in New Japan, The Firefly Funhouse, the 24/7 Title, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Montez Ford from The Street Profits talks to Sam Roberts about winning the tag team championship at NXT Take Over, getting to NXT, what he learned in Evolve, creating the Street Profits, Sam's comments on Bianca Belair, and more. Sam talks about Jon Moxley in New Japan, The Firefly Funhouse, the 24/7 Title, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Daniel Bryan talks to Sam Roberts about going out with a concussion, Sheamus' head busting him open, his new book, and more, in a classic interview. Sam talks about the Tom Magee story and documentary, AEW on TNT, Money In The Bank, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Daniel Bryan talks to Sam Roberts about going out with a concussion, Sheamus' head busting him open, his new book, and more, in a classic interview. Sam talks about the Tom Magee story and documentary, AEW on TNT, Money In The Bank, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Pat Buck talks to Sam Roberts about bringing Wrestle Pro to Alaska, maintaining his own promotion, getting back to wrestling, and more. Sam talks the new Bray Wyatt, Dana Brooke, Dustin Runnels, The Shield's last ride, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Pat Buck talks to Sam Roberts about bringing Wrestle Pro to Alaska, maintaining his own promotion, getting back to wrestling, and more. Sam talks the new Bray Wyatt, Dana Brooke, Dustin Runnels, The Shield's last ride, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Miz talks to Sam Roberts about the 2K Games Million Dollar Challenge, his match with Shane McMahon at Wrestlemania, his reality show, Sam's comments on the last Kick Off show, and more. Sam talks Wrestlemania weekend, JR going to AEW, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

The Miz talks to Sam Roberts about the 2K Games Million Dollar Challenge, his match with Shane McMahon at Wrestlemania, his reality show, Sam's comments on the last Kick Off show, and more. Sam talks Wrestlemania weekend, JR going to AEW, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jake The Snake Roberts talks to Sam Roberts about wrestling today, his great Andre the Giant stories, his heat with Ultimate Warrior, wrestling The Undertaker, being a part of WWE creative, and more. Sam talks KofiMania, Ronda Rousey's new attitude, Fastlane results, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling

Jake The Snake Roberts talks to Sam Roberts about wrestling today, his great Andre the Giant stories, his heat with Ultimate Warrior, wrestling The Undertaker, being a part of WWE creative, and more. Sam talks KofiMania, Ronda Rousey's new attitude, Fastlane results, and more, in the State of Wrestling.  Get $10 off your first purchase from Seat Geek, by downloading the SeatGeek app and entering promo code "SAM" For even more content- become a Notsam Shill on Patreon- Patreon.com/notsamwrestling See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join Queeny and Sam For an Awesome Show!

非常感谢热心听众【Maggie-吕欣欣】对本文稿的贡献The Spring Festival is around the corner. An old question that has been brought up again for many couples is whose home should they go back for Spring Festival? 春节就要到了，对于很多夫妻和情侣来说，一个老问题又摆在了眼前。春节到底应该回谁家过年呢？ Heyang: So going home for Spring Festival or the Chinese New Year, that’s the most important moment for family reunion in China. Why is it sometimes a little bit of a difficult question to take the answer for couples?Sam: For first of all, I think on this topic, me, Heyang and Luo Yu are probably the three most unqualified people to talk about it, because I’m the lonely “老外 that can’t go back to England because it’s too far and it would be too much effort for the sake of the week. And you guys are both from Beijing right, which means you don’t travel on Chinese New Eve anyway.Heyang: Oh Sam I can’t believe that you didn’t pick up that very important piece of information about Luo Yu because you guys are good friends. Luo Yu is not from Beijing.Sam: Really? Where are you from, Luo Yu?Luo Yu: I was born in Xinjiang and raised in Xinjiang as well.Heyang: [We should pretty much…talks about everything on the show.]Sam: Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region?Luo Yu: You’re joking.Sam: I’m not joking. You have a thick Beijing accent.Luo Yu: Are you my best friend, Sam?Sam: But you’ve got a thick Beijing accent when you speak.Luo Yu: No, I don’t have a thick Beijing accent. Heyang does.Heyang: It’s hardly thick, Luo Yu. Mine, well, a little bit. Yes, I was hoping that you wouldn’t highlight this fact.Sam: From Beijing [I’m actually about that?](Luo Yu: But even…)Heyang: Yes, Luo Yu, you’re gonna say?Luo Yu: But even speaking of which, I think Sam hasn’t highlighted the right thing.Heyang: I thought we were in the same camp (Luo Yu: We are.), the singleton’s camp. So stop, you know, highlighting that fact. Well, now the cat is out of the bag, let’s just talk about it then. You haven’t answered the question for me. Why is it a bit of a big deal and a hard decision for couples?Luo Yu: So well Heyang and me don’t have this current question because we are both single and fabulous【注：Single and Fabulous化用《欲望都市》S02E04 即“单身贵族” 呼应赫扬的’the singleton’s camp’】. But when you are happily involved in a lot of family affairs with your lovely spouse, you have to decide this very important issue. Is it your mother’s house or your husband’s mother’s house to visit?Heyang: For the Spring Festival.Sam: So let me give a couple of details other way here. First of all, Luo Yu, you were just on a really big TV show where you meet that special someone so we have a chat coming later on today (Heyang: Oh, dear). And secondly, am I right in saying that in china there’s a tradition here of the girls usually going back to the boy’s house as a sign of respect and if the guy doesn’t take the girl home and has to go to the girl’s house, it kind of demoralizes to a certain extent. Is that right?Heyang: Well usually I think the tradition is, especially if you’re married, then it’s usually the wife would go to the husband’s mom’s home to celebrate the Chinese New Year.Luo Yu: Yes, as the society has been evolving all the time, I think both husband and wife have become breadwinners of the family. So I think they have been quarreling about this case.Heyang: Why does earning money, been financially independent have anything to do with quarreling about who should go to whoever’s house? (Sam: Wait)Luo Yu: Because traditionally we think ‘嫁鸡随鸡 嫁狗随狗’, given that you don’t have financial independence. You are not the breadwinner. Now as the wife, you are financially independent and you can also make the right choice to visit your family first. (Sam: That’s quite bad.)Heyang: Oh my, that’s a little…What he said is going to start more wars at home and that’s exactly what we don’t want to happen.Sam: I’ve got…I have a few more questions. So let’s just say for example…You’re from Xinjiang right (Luo Yu: Right). Heyang’s from Beijing. Let’s say you two are dating (Heyang: Stop using people in this studio as example). So Heyang and Luo Yu are dating and they both work in Shanghai (Heyang: Oh dear what?) Is it a tour possible for you to get your parents to go from Xinjiang to Shanghai and you get your parents to go from Beijing to Shanghai? And they then just all meet where you guys reside and then everyone’s happy.Heyang: That’s too beautiful a picture. I don’t want to imagine. (Sam: But is that possible?)What do you want to say, Luo Yu?Luo Yu: First you have to have a very big mansion to occupy those four parents.Sam: We stay in a hotel. Everyone live in Shanghai. So it’s gonna be…Everyone…Luo Yu: That’s really a pathetic picture. You invite both of the parents coming from Xinjiang and Beijing to Shanghai, then you settle them down in a hotel?Sam: Ok I got a second option. I got a second option. Heyang and her parents, Luo Yu and his parents all buy plane tickets and they go on holidays to Thailand or Sanya. Will that work?Luo Yu: That’s…What do you say, Heyang? I agree with his idea.Heyang: I don’t agree with this idea (Luo Yu: Why?! Sam: I can see you are thinking about it Luo Yu.)Heyang: No he’s not, not like I can read his mind but no, he’s not and…(Sam: You guys are really in sync. Couple sync) And I’m in sync with you too, you know, this is Round Table. (Sam: It’s different but yeah) Okay okay, let’s get back on track. I think that is one suggestion that makes sense that these days if you have the financial means, you don’t have to have the big mansion, but you need to have a place for two set of parents to come together I think that’s really nice if you can afford that because these days a lot of us are the single child, the only child of your family. So I would hate it that one day if I get married to someone and I would have to leave my parents at home on this special day. What do you think, Luo Yu?Luo Yu: So my advice is quite simple: Earn as much money as you can and bring your four parents. You go to Maldives, go to Thailand Phuket, go to Saipan, go to all those beautiful resorts on beautiful islands.Sam: Sounds really nice. Heyang you are a lucky girl.Heyang: It has nothing to do with me. And if it was two people who go on holiday because they’re good friends, it should be Luo Yu and Sam.

This week, I sit down and talk with the talented and very interesting trumpeter/composer Sam Wells. Sam has performed and given clinics across North America at many festivals and the like spreading the gospel of trumpet/electronic music. We talk about using electronics as an instrumentation, bringing a new music mindset to old standards, and the performer-composer relationship, both in past centuries and today. Featured on this episode: Sam's composition (dys)functions for trumpet/electronics (performed by Sam) For all things Sam Wells: samwellsmusic.com For more about SPLICE (Summer institute for Performance, Listening, Interpretation, and Creation of Electroacoustic music), where Sam is on faculty: www.splice.institute